Prototype planetary lander and rover designs are shown in place on simulated Red Planet terrain.
This rubble-strewn model of the Red Planet is used to put prototype planetary rovers through their paces. Officially known as the Automation & Planetary Robotics Lab, its nickname is the ‘Mars Yard.’ The 8 x 8-meter terrain ‘sandbox,’ filled with different sizes of sand, gravel and rock, is part of the Planetary Robotics Laboratory at ESA’s ESTEC technical center in Noordwijk, the Netherlands. It offers a small crater, a boulder field, a sandy dune and a gravel slope area, and serves to assess rover locomotion and navigation, as well as the positioning of robotic arms — and then to check how all these elements operate together in practice, as integration is a major challenge in space robotic systems.
Specialized equipment for precisely recording the robots’ performance includes motion-tracking infrared cameras.
